Security News

How a Vacation Week Became a Backdoor Into Classified Systems

The Register · 24 Sept 2026

Key Takeaway Make sure change approval processes cannot be circumvented when a key security reviewer is unavailable, and require sign-off from a second qualified person before any firewall or network change is approved.

A security researcher's account of his time as an information system security officer at a government contractor reveals how a single firewall change, pushed through during his absence, created a serious security gap. Developers wanted to simplify moving code from a low-security test datacenter, shared with commercial tenants like Microsoft and Oracle, into a classified production datacenter holding sensitive data. To make deployments easier, they proposed opening a firewall rule allowing a provisioning server to reach production servers directly.

The security officer flagged this to the Change Review Board as a serious risk, warning that it would let anyone with access to the low-security datacenter potentially reach the highly classified environment. Despite this objection, the developers waited until he was on vacation, then took their request straight to the Change Acceptance Board, which approved it without the same scrutiny.

This case highlights a common weakness in organisations of any size: convenience-driven changes can quietly undo carefully designed security boundaries, especially when they bypass the people responsible for assessing risk.

network security firewall misconfiguration government contractor insider risk change management

Summarised by CISO AI from The Register. We link back to every original so you can read it yourself.